THE ART DETECTIVES

Discover the heroic team that tracks down lost or stolen artworks and antiques, then returns them to their rightful owners. 

- By Ellie Tennant

At 2am on Tuesday 10th June, 2003, a masked gang broke into Waddesdon Manor, the 19th-century chateau-style National Trust property built by the Rothschild banking dynasty near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire. They stole over 100 gold boxes in the raid, worth in the region of £5m. Pippa Shirley, Director of Waddesdon Manor (and formerly Head of Collections), lived on the estate and was woken by a phone call in the early hours.

'It was a really traumatic night,' she recalls with a shudder. 'The memory is still very vivid even though it's 20 years ago. The house manager phoned to tell me that there had been a break-in, so I jumped in my car and drove to the Manor. He took me into the room where the gold boxes had been on display in two cases, and there was broken glass all over the floor. It was just so shocking. It felt like the most awful violation.'

Fast-forward to today and one of the missing boxes is now back on display, thanks to the hard work of the Art Loss Register (ALR), the leading due-diligence provider for the art market, which maintains the world's largest private database of stolen art, antiques and collectables including objects as diverse as classic cars and musical instruments.

Set up in 1990 by founding shareholders, including major businesses from the insurance industry and the art market, the ALR has a team of 16 employees in London and 30 in India.

We're a small team with a big reach,' says Lucy O'Meara, Recoveries Specialist at the ALR. Our work is behind the scenes in the art world - it's not unusual that people haven't heard of us.'